I'm saying that without an evil hierarchy connecting communities, any individual community can be suborned by bad ideas and the other anarchist communities have voluntarily given up the right to intercede.

And that's a bad thing how? So long as the actions of a community don't spill over and affect other communities, I fail to see how not interceding is a bad thing. Once it does spill over and affect other communities, then they have the right to deal with it, but again, any alliances will be loose ones. Most of the indigenous societies enjoyed less warfare and with women being roughly on equal footing with the men in the group.

I have a feeling you're one of those types who believe that humans are inherently brutish and cruel, but truth doesn't bear that out. Despite all the wargle-bargle about how people will riot in the face of a disaster, the truth is only a small percentage of bad seeds riot. The rest of the population band together and do what they can to help each other get through the situation. And often the population manages to organize themselves, decide who does what, and what needs to be done, without a lot of help from the State and without needing to brutally enforce their rule.

Again, for all the Survival of the Fittest talk, humans are inherently wired for altruism and empathy. And really, in the long run, altruism wins out. Yeah, looting and pillaging gets you plenty in the short-term, but the person who utilizes that strategy, pretty much can never relax their grip on power; if they show a moment of weakness, their people/enemies will take advantage of it.

Since mortality is the fact of the human condition (a person will get sick, hurt, and old, regardless of how strong they may be), eventually they will be in a position of vulnerability, needing the help of others. And there is a basic rule: piss off enough people and eventually some of them will come looking for you. Again, how many people would be willing to stick out their necks to help this asshole when things get rough for him.

If we must use the Survival of Fittest logic, if a style of living/beliefs work for a community, then the community will survive/prosper. If said beliefs are in fact terrible ones, then the community will collapse with the survivors probably opting to join other communities.

In any case, basic knowledge of nature is that diversity is strength. Having many different ways of living works better than our current One-Size-Fits-All standard which has only managed to keep going as long as it has because until recently, there were always new lands to expand to with new resources to exploit. The problem is now, Industrial Civilization has effectively expanded to every corner of the globe; there are no more new lands to exploit. It's keeping itself going by cannibalizing other Capitalist nations, but there's an obvious flaw in that strategy.

In Africa there are small, independent, communal tribal groups still performing female genital mutilation. Are you making the argument that allowing that to continue is better than intervening?

I understand that altruism is innate and many communal groups have lots of morally desirable behavior. But I strongly suspect that, for example, the patriarchy that permeates modern society didn't arise from nothing when the first hierarchies were formed. It was a continuation of patriarchy that already existed. There are plenty of well-known examples of primitive low technology communities without sexism, but there are plenty more - the majority, as far as I understand it - where it was prevalent. And it was prevalent despite countless thousands of years of freedom from large scale hierarchy like we have today.

RedEmmaSpeaks wrote at August 22, 2018 at 7:36 PM
(edited at August 22, 2018 at 8:06 PM)

I'm curious as well. After all, Vietnam and the current War on Terror prove how easy it is to defeat an ideology via military violence. FGM is terrible, but I fail to see how intervention, sweeping in, guns blazing, and taking over, would solve it. I suppose he could mean nonviolent solutions like spreading education, but I doubt it. Usually when people use the word "intervention," they are almost invariably referring to military solutions.

Though the simplest and best answer is edmund has no basic knowledge of anthropology or tribal society like at all.

As I wrote to BigGeorge, I'll repeat here. I'm not sure what kind of intervention is appropriate. But I think if non-intervention and allowing the existing society to evolve on its own was going to fix the problem, it would have happened centuries ago.

Even spreading educational material is a far cry from anarchist non-intervention. Isn't it?

It is a horrible practice, but at the same time, no one can police the whole world and it's a foolish thing to try; it amplifies problems, not solves them. About the only intervention I would suggest is spreading educational materials and providing a haven to anyone fleeing said abuses. Any other, like I said, would only exacerbate the problem and the people who would be in the most danger in that situation, are women and children because those are the most vulnerable populations in any conflict.

Like I said, I focused my concerns primarily on military options because most of the time, when people talk about intervention, unless they're talking about a drug-addicted relative, they mean some kind of military effort.

I'm not sure. I don't want to fall into the military-industrial trap of "invade, that will fix everything" or even just the general political trap of "just do something, the important thing is to have the appearance of trying to solve the problem".

But "ignore it, and hope the problem will resolve itself" has not worked for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years - how old is the practice? So I see no evidence that non-intervention will ever solve the problem.